One powerful user experience for Maitland Group

About the client

The Maitland Group is an advisory, administration and family office firm that provides legal, fiduciary, investment and fund administration services to a diverse range of clients through 18 offices in 13 jurisdictions.

As an organisation that offers a one-firm approach across best-of- breed multi-jurisdictional platforms, the Maitland Group required a complete redesign and development of its corporate website – which houses several business units within one digital portal.

A new platform and user experience

The Group briefed Kri8it to provide a new digital platform that offered a modern, intuitive and informative user experience (UX) in line with international best practice. According to Head Developer at Kri8it, Charl Pretorius.

“A key challenge was finding a strategy for showcasing a significant amount of content in a way that is aesthetically pleasing, easy to navigate and keeps the user engaged.”

The Maitland Group consists of various service areas or business units – including legal, fiduciary and investment services. Some of these entities within the broader Group require their own websites, yet these also need to fit seamlessly into the corporate portal. Kri8it therefore needed to develop an architecture that caters for scalability yet maintains the user-friendly, consistent UX.

“We needed a robust yet flexible framework that enables us to create these other sites with ease,” Charl explains.

Each business unit within the Group has a unique service offering and therefore, unique communication needs. Kri8it catered for these disparate requirements under one branded platform by developing a modern, responsive website that follows current web design and UX trends while keeping the brand’s corporate identity intact.

In terms of design, Kri8it took a modular approach, with a clean layout look and feel to suit the content-heavy nature of the website.

“We created a system that is easy to manage and update whilst keeping templates flexible and unique. A mix of custom templates and a customised page builder allows for the perfect mix of continuity and content design to keep the content fresh and easy to consume,” Charl adds.

Due to the content design requirements Kri8it explored a mix of custom theme development and customised page builder integration. The team incorporated a page builder in a way that provided Kri8it with full control over both the look and feel of the site, as well as its general structure. However, this approach also afforded the flexibility that a page builder brings in terms of page content design.

The new digital platform offers seamless integrations with some of Maitland’s internal financial systems – pulling in daily data daily updates their internal systems and displaying these on the website to keep clients informed in a highly efficient, reliable and accurate way.

Transforming the digital magazine

Kri8it was also tasked with transforming Intouch, Maitland’s quarterly newsletter and a sought-after source of thought leadership content, into a dynamic digital publication. Previously, Intouch was available online in a more static format – within a PDF page flipper environment. However, the Group wanted to transform this publication into a more modern digital experience by creating a mini-site that offers a user experience similar to reading a magazine.

Kri8it brought this concept to life. As part of the Maitland framework, the team created the digital magazine as a mini-site that can house past issues and is easily updated as a new issue is released. This system integrates directly with the Maitland framework and website.

Using the same page builder integration, the team built a robust digital publication experience for Intouch. This system provides all the benefits of a traditional publication, as well as the advantages of a digital platform in terms of accessibility, SEO and the ability to track users and analyse their behaviour on the platform.

The redesigned Maitland Group website provides a diverse client base with ease of access to the information and services they need.

How can Kri8it help you achieve your digital communication and business goals?